Posted
by
BeauHDon Tuesday August 08, 2017 @10:30PM
from the awaiting-approval dept.

An anonymous reader shares a report from The New York Times (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source): The average temperature in the United States has risen rapidly and drastically since 1980, and recent decades have been the warmest of the past 1,500 years, according to a sweeping federal climate change report awaiting approval by the Trump administration. The draft report by scientists from 13 federal agencies, which has not yet been made public, concludes that Americans are feeling the effects of climate change right now. It directly contradicts claims by President Trump and members of his cabinet who say that the human contribution to climate change is uncertain, and that the ability to predict the effects is limited. "Evidence for a changing climate abounds, from the top of the atmosphere to the depths of the oceans," a draft of the report states. A copy of it was obtained by The New York Times. The authors note that thousands of studies, conducted by tens of thousands of scientists, have documented climate changes on land and in the air. "Many lines of evidence demonstrate that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse (heat-trapping) gases, are primarily responsible for recent observed climate change," they wrote. The report was completed this year and is a special science section of the National Climate Assessment, which is congressionally mandated every four years. The National Academy of Sciences has signed off on the draft report, and the authors are awaiting permission from the Trump administration to release it. "The report concludes that even if humans immediately stopped emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the world would still feel at least an additional 0.50 degrees Fahrenheit (0.30 degrees Celsius) of warming over this century compared with today," reports The New York Times. "The projected actual rise, scientists say, will be as much as 2 degrees Celsius." Given the Trump administration's stance on climate change, some of the scientists who worked on the report are concerned that the report will be suppressed.

As the draft report (I understand) would require the last "OK" from the White House before becoming a final report, it's widely understood that this wouldn't be forthcoming from the current administration so (as is the practice in Washington) it was 'leaked' in really its final version pursuant to its authors' or the leakers' personal agenda, not really as a "government" report (insofar as the "government" is those elected to office).

I suspect that this practice - widely regarded as reasonable and fair during this administration considering the scathing disregard held for the President by many of the mandarins in Washington and the Press Corps - is going to become the norm that will eventually come back around and bite them in the ass.

Wikileaks defies the narrative and must be destroyed. Like a good comrade, you are trying to do your part, but the best you can do is "according to them". In other words, you've got nothing and you know it.

If, or more likely, when, Wikileaks releases something false, everyone on the planet will know about it within 5 minutes. It will cross the SJW hivemind in about 2 seconds and then you lot will be going door to door telling people. And then you'll pretend that the one error discredits the terabytes of

If, or more likely, when, Wikileaks releases something false, everyone on the planet will know about it within 5 minutes.

Actually, all those leaks from Wikileaks about Russian incursion into Ukraine and the leaks of Russian cybersecurity malware and the leaks of documents regarding money laundering by Trump and the Russians have turned out to be false.

Oh wait, none of those exist because Wikileaks is a partisan organization that uses illegally-obtained information in a selective manner.

Continuing skepticism in the face of overwhelming evidence doesn't make you look clever or thoughtful. It makes you look like a partisan zealot refusing to admit when you're wrong. Here, you can read it right on their own Twitter feed:

The scientists who authored the report are confused as to why this is a story, and you're going to quibble over "publicly available" semantics? No, it was put up on public sites for "public comments". That's hardly equivalent to a "leak", and you damn well know it. I can't believe you're seriously making that argument. Or else, you're doing an awesome job of trolling me right now.

And seriously, "fake news" is an alt-right conspiracy? Are you kidding me? That was a narrative started by the left/mainstream media to explain how Hillary could have possibly lost the election. But the left gets hoist by their own petard whenever something like this happens, as reporters occasionally demonstrate a complete disregard for the most basic fact-checking before they breathlessly run a story that just happens to show the current administration in a bad light. We saw it happen with the Washington Post and the "Russians hacking the electrical grid" nonsense (they didn't even bother contacting Burlington Electric for a statement), and we see it now again with the non-existent fact-checking of the New York Times before publishing a completely made-up story.

Would I call that "fake news"? No, not really. Just plain bad journalism. But in the end, it really amounts to the same thing - misinformation presented as news.

This "leak" apparently is just a slightly revised version of the public comment version. So not really a "leak" but its not exactly the same as "Was already publically available", and its entirely plausible the scientists interviewed do believe it will be buried. Having worked in climate research theres incredible pressure on scientists to bury results that confirm just how bad its getting, particularly when goverments start putting faux-conservative barb

Gasoline usage in the developed world has largely leveled off and a large percentage of future vehicles will be electric. The majority of local trips may be electric long before 2040. More cities in developing countries are pushing electric vehicles to solve air quality problems.

Out of all the forces of nature we have first-hand experience of, not necessarily of all the forces we have seen evidence of, the greenhouse gas theory is the most likely.

This is the best argument that can be made for human-caused climate change.

We aren't talking about some simple system here. We can't just jump to conclusions. This is the ENTIRE WORLD weather system. It may be governed by forces we are not totally aware of or are totally ignorant of.

What exactly is the proof that global warming is due to human carbon emissions rather than a natural warming cycle with all the fermentation products in the soil and water from the beginning of the last ice age to present that are being released?

"Climate change" theorists do not seem to be able to answer this question, but it is the crux of the validity of their point of view.Do they realize that the ice age literally just happened on a geological time-scale? That geological science just sprouted out of nowhere in the last 150 years and it's mostly been used to exploit coal, gas, oil, and minerals? There is only so much we have experience with, and only so much our theories can tell us. We simply do not know much about the planet's long-term weather/climate cycles, there is only so much the geological record has told us, it has only been looked into for so much.

Just everybody chill out.There are much bigger and more immediate problems related to human presence that are objectively proven in cause and effect that are ravaging our not only our planet's natural state, but our own lives.

Honestly this "climate change" issue seems like a distraction from these issues, manipulating people into guilt over something that they have a very indirect influence on. Sorry but your efforts to 'go green' mean absolutely nothing in the face of industrial pollution, the most immediate and terrible effects of which would not be climate change even if that were proven to be the cause.

We need to worry about our society, the centralization of power: mass surveillance, automation, wealth disparity, human rights (especially freedom of speech and quality of education), the list goes on.You cannot do ANYTHING about climate change until you deal with these problems. Stop kidding yourself.

That's an argument religious people use a lot to 'prove' their point. They ask you: "Were you there?" when you talk about dinosaurs or other things that are older than 6000 years. I'd rather trust experts in their field than someone who tells me I'm ignorant without giving any proof.

What exactly is the proof that global warming is due to human carbon emissions rather than a natural warming cycle

3 words: "Rate of change"

Look at the 1st derivative.

Look over the last 20,000 years of natural cycles and the rate of change has never been close to what it is right now. Natural cycles have never moved more than 1 degree over a 500 years, and usually moved 0.5 degrees or less. In the last 150 years we've moved nearly 1.5 degrees.

The New York Times has added a correction to their article [nytimes.com]. At the end of the article, a paragraph now states

Correction: August 9, 2017An article on Tuesday about a sweeping federal climate change report referred incorrectly to the availability of the report. While it was not widely publicized, the report was uploaded by the nonprofit Internet Archive in January; it was not first made public by The New York Times.

Why was this leaked? Because somebody thought it might be suppressed? How about giving the administration a chance before assuming it will be suppressed and breaking the law? Why publish it right away instead of waiting to see if it does get suppressed? This is just like Reality Winter's dumb-ass move.

This is a problem, and it indicates there's a huge problem in the Federal bureaucracy with paper-pushers deciding for themselves how to run the government. If the administration was hiding something,

I guess you weren't aware that the option you mention has already been taken away in a fashion clearly intended to send a message. People who don't toe the Trump line have either been shuffled off to irrelevant jobs, pushed into resigning the way they tried to do with Priebus and Sessions, or just fired.

I fully agree that humans influence the environment but the uncertainty in models is larger than the supposed influence.
Even if you fully accept that all climate warming is due to human influence you still have to answer two important questions.
1. Is a warmer planet bad?
2. Can government do something without destroying the economy

It's clear the establishment assumes yes to both answers by default but they haven't even asked the supposed 97% about this.
On the first question they do fear mongering all the time, predicting distopian futures that turn out to be false every time and blaming every negative weather event on human influence.
On the second question; their beloved Paris accord only promises to reduce the increase in temperature by a tiny amount.
But then they'll say it's only the first step, basically admitting there will be an endless stream of agreements that do almost nothing.
It's important to keep the economy intact because in a bad economy people care less for the environment.

All of this reveals a distinct anti-human attitude.
It's like asking a termite: Q: Does termite behavior change the environment? A: Yes. Conclusion: The termite hill should be destroyed.
Fossil fuels are what make our quality of life possible, without it we would degrade 100 years.
"Renewable energy" is shit. Because it's unreliable and too expensive.

Because the topic is climate change. Not surprisingly most of the deniers are AC, and it seems like the disinformation and trolling tactics are just as predictable as always. It leads me to think that people are spending their time responding to bots, which lack the creativity to come up with any kind of new argument.

I'm a little less amazed./. has traditionally had a lot of fairly intelligent people posting here. Unfortunately, it's had a lot of specialists, and in general, smart specialists tend to assume that their expertise in one narrow niche is applicable to others. (Spoiler, it's generally not.) If you've spent any time working with university professors, this becomes abundantly clear. "I'm really good at X, and I don't understand Y, so Y must be wrong, because I can understand anything, because I'm an e

The Dunning-Kruger effect [wikipedia.org] is well known on/., and I call what you point out as the "Carson Corollary"[1]: someone actually is intelligent in a specific field, but they mistakenly believe this makes them intelligent in all fields.

Regardless of where they get their talking points, if they sound good and/or come from a "trusted" source someone suffering the Carson Corollary won't bother to do any research or give measured thought to contrary points or evidence, they presume their own knowledge of a subject is

The globe gets warmer and cooler and has since it formed, life goes on.

So prove that the current warming is natural. You've made a statement that can be proven, but it never is. You can't just say the earth has been warmer therefore it's natural. That's like if my car breaks down with smoke pouring from under the hood I think it's just out of gas, because it's happened before. I could check gauges and see, but I'm relying not on current data but instead an historical anecdote. Really, the only evidence you have is that the earth was warmer at periods before. Yeah, no shit, no scientist has ever said it wasn't. What the research shows is that this warming is unprecedented in the earth's history. So your statement is nothing but an unproven guess with no evidence of support. What natural processes are at work here that do account for the warming?

As well, it may be that the earth has been hotter at times in the past but never has the temperature risen at such an alarming rate. It's not just the temperature rising, it's the rate that it's changing.

As well, it may be that the earth has been hotter at times in the past but never has the temperature risen at such an alarming rate. It's not just the temperature rising, it's the rate that it's changing.

From human records, that is false - the earth has not be hotter than it is now. It may be hotter prior to human civilization, but all the records we have (and proxies) indicate that today it's the hottest it's ever been. And it will be even if we halt all activity right now.

Granted, it USED TO BE hotter in the past, but we've already beat that record (recently).

In fact, XKCD has a very nice graph [xkcd.com] of the earth's temperature through history. The 0 degree mark is chosen as the 1961-1990 average temperature, but it's arbitrary. There was a period where it was about a half a degree warmer than that line, but at the very end, you can see we've exceeded that. It only happened about 5 years ago, at that.

Well yes, during epochs like when the dinosaurs roamed the Earth. But the issue here isn't that the Earth has been hotter, the issue is that it has never been so hot and supported human civilization. You understand the patterns of where civilizations have developed over the last 10,000 is intrinsically tied to post-glacial climate, and now that we're seriously fucking that up, there are going to be significant impacts on the descendants of those civilizations. In other words, pretty much everyone alive today, and over the next century.

In some areas better food production, in other ways much worse. While in the medium term you could see more precipitation in the American Midwest, in the long term it will mean higher precipitation in winter and much less in summer, with much higher temperatures. In other words, one of North America's major bread baskets will become less conducive to agriculture. So yes, while they may be growing wheat in the Northwest Territories, for the US it could, in a hundred years mean less food security and more reliance on imports. Rinse and repeat for several grain-growing regions around the world. And understand that the patterns of civilization are still largely based on climactic conditions that came into place at the end of the last glacial period, so we're talking about billions of people living in regions that may, in a century, be far less capable of sustaining those populations.

Oh, and let's talk about the collapse of fisheries because the other really bad side effect of higher concentrations of CO2 is significant alterations of pH levels in the oceans, meaning more dead zones and large algal blooms which are going to choke out a lot of ocean life.

I'd say we can't really handle getting warmer any better than we can handle getting colder. In either case, there are a whole lot of people who are going to find food costs rising, and while the developed world may be able to absorb those higher costs, more marginal populations may have a harder time. The other thing to factor in is that people just don't sit on their chunk of land now being turned into an inhospitable desert where they can't grow crops or raise livestock, or where rising sea levels and more powerful storm systems wipe out their crops. They get up and move, so you'll see more large scale migrations, so if you think Syria's disintegration is bad, wait fifty years.

Trying to extol some modest benefits to climate change without mentioning the significant economic and social costs seems at best naive, and at worst disingenuous to me.

I'd say we can't really handle getting warmer any better than we can handle getting colder.

In a certain fundamental sense, it is much easier to handle getting colder. Heat is easily generated by various processes, but it cannot be destroyed. It can be moved around, but that won't help if it's hot everywhere.

In a very practical sense, Snowball Earth is a harder scenario to escape than Greenhouse Earth. Both have high albedos (due to snow and clouds, respectively), which helps reduce temperature. It's pretty impractical to replace much of the energy contribution of solar loading by burning terrestrial sources of energy: sunlight is too bright, and the Earth has too big a cross-section.

Climate prediction is based on mathematical models which are trained on historical data and then carried forward to predict the future.This process has never worked in any other human endeavour.For example, the same process is used by many people in an attempt to predict the stock market. Does that ever work out?The same process is used to predict the effect of changes in the economy, such as raising the interest rates. Has that ever gone horribly wrong(*)?

You do realize what you're doing is comparing the global climate, an actual physical planetary wide system that's been here for millenia before any man was ever born, to man made social constructs and saying that because we cannot predict the latter we surely can't predict the former.

This is not sound logic. The climate and the stock market are both extremely chaotic systems meaning that small changes in some values can have huge impacts on the stability of the whole system. However what you and others making this argument always conveniently forget is that underlying the study of climate and the mathematical models themselves are actual natural sciences like chemistry. We don't have to 'guess' how the greenhouse effect works, or how much heat is absorbed/reflected by different gasses, these are all things that can be measured and tested in a lab.

Obviously because the amount of metrics that needs to be factored in to model something as vast as the global climate is so high that the models cannot be 100 % certain, and obviously there are human components in the equation that increase this uncertainty but the core of your argument is still not correct. The stock market can crash at any given time due to any number of actions and the prices plummet. For you to be able to argue that the climate is the same way, you'd have to argue that at any given moment way may spontaneously enter into an ice age, which is clearly not true.

There is no instance where a mathematical model with the complexity of Earth's climate has made reliable predictions in any way.

There's also never been a time in the history of the species when we've had access to as much computing power, machine learning and actual hard data about the state of the climate.

This is one of the real problems with the climate science debate: no model of that complexity has ever been accurate, therefore it's incorrect to be making decisions based on their results.

No. You see, the thing with the climate is: we have to make predictions because the future state of the climate has a direct impact on the survival of the species. The models that we do have reflect our current, best understanding of the climate, and they're getting better as more data come in and machine learning steps in.If you ignore the models there's essentially nothing to base our decisions on and you could argue that it's just fine for us to start burning up all the remaining oil and gas because 'who knows what's going to happen'. But that's just BS. We obviously don't know the future of the climate with certainty, but we do know enough to know that certain actions are going to make things a lot worse.

You also mentioned disease outbreak models, so think about it in this light: should we throw out our current understanding of epidemiology because the outbreak models are not (yet) all that precise? Should the doctors stop wearing gloves, should we stop vaccinations, sanitation and all these things which have a demonstrable and proven [historyofvaccines.org] effect on lowering the rates of outbreak and infection because we're not 100 % omniscient about the time and place of future outbreaks? Huh?

So either you can listen to the people with the most information and understanding about the climate and its current state, or you can keep telling yourself that corporations and atmospheric gasses are equally unp

We have great models for the physics and chemistry in human bodies, so why can't we produce an artificial human brain? What makes global climate so much more tractable to simulation than a single human body?

Translation: I have no real clue how either climatology or economics work, but if I use the words "problem", "mathematical" and "model" enough times, somehow that wins the argument for me.

The real problem here, sir, is you don't have the vaguest idea what the fuck you're talking about. If you have some alternative explanation as to where the energy increased CO2 concentrations will inevitably trap in the lower atmosphere are going, then by all means provide it. But this rambling word salad only demonstrates your ignorance.

What I don't understand overall is that warming isn't necessarily bad. Higher temps and higher CO2 levels? Better food production. Humans at current population and technology levels can handle getting warmer a lot better that we can handle getting colder.

And looking down the road at technology mitigating it, pretty sure it's easier to cool the earth on a global scale than it is warming it up.

Nuclear winter FTW!

We're kinda adapted to current temperature levels. For example, we've built our coastal cities where the coasts are currently, not where they would be if sea levels were a few meters higher.

That means sea levels rising ever higher as well. For example over a hundred million people in Bangladesh, one of the world's poorest countries, live in a river delta that is barely knee height over the level of Indian Ocean. They will either drown or have to mass migrate to survive. Where exactly do you migrate them, considering that Asia is already the most populated continent?

Humans aren't the only, or most important things, on the planet. We're fucking up ecosystems that have taken millions of years to stabilize and balance, and cannot react fast enough to survive the rapid changes we are causing.

If you would have said warming isn't necessarily *all* bad, you'd be a lot more accurate. There will be some benefits, for sure. But overall the bad is expected to outweigh the good. It's easier to measure the impact in terms of costs, rather than "cans" and "can'ts". Because yes, of course we *can* survive it all and do all sorts of technological wonders combating the negative effects, but what is it going to cost? We're going to having rebuild/retrofit/move our coastal areas which encompass many major cities. We're going to have to shift our agricultural production regions, not just crops but livestock too. "Hot spots" might become quite inhospitable where susceptible people may not leave the house for more than a few hours (infants/elderly) or impede outdoor day jobs for everyone else. Then the oceans, oh the oceans. Don't know where to start on that one, let's just leave it at wild seafood may become a delicacy.

I'm going to throw a dart and say we're talking about not 10's but 100's of trillions of pure USD. Not counting the impact in human costs. That's the problem.

Better food production in limited areas. However, the land will be devastated in many regions that are currently relied upon. More volatile weather will result in extreme drought followed by extreme rainfalls. Some plants will do well but many will not.

So what is the real effect of this? Mass extinctions of wildlife both on land and the ocean. Untold millions will perish from die from famine while others will migrated. It won't always be migrating for refuge either, wars will be fought over land for food production.

But hey, if you like mass extinctions, mass migration, war, genocide and famine, the future is looking rosy.

It's astounding to me how short sighted climate alarmists are. The only people who should be concerned about warming is land developers in Russia and Canada. There's a whole lot of Earth's surface which is about to become prime real estate for agriculture and growth.

I'm astounded how generous you far sighted climate "laissez-faire"-ists are - because obviously you must be willing to pay for the means to let every single human on this planet (and of course outside of it) to "survive in the vacuum of space, underwater aboard submarines, as well as in some of the most inhospitable places on Earth". But please pay your dues before you turn Earth into a vacuum under-water inhospitable world.

No one is making a criminal accusation; there is no innocence or guilt to be presumed.

However, a preponderance of evidence according to the scientific community, and the governments of nearly every country on Earth, is that humans are causing global warming and that it has the potential to do catastrophic harm to civilization.

If you were genuinely interested in the truth on this subject you would have found it out rather than raising spurious, discredited arguments on an internet forum for casual geeks, and thinking that the rhetorical turd you have dropped has an intimidating perfection because people would rather step around it than sweep it up.

You have chosen to be wrong on the internet, and more damning, chosen to be proud of it. You have a great future in politics or the 'chan. But the quality of your future IRL still depends largely on remaining above sea level.

Interesting article, and graphs, for all that they're 4 to 5 years old now, but so much wrong with what you wrote...

So the theory has no proof

So the graphs* you're citing as evidence (or lack of evidence, w/e), which clearly show a trend of warming over the last 30 years, albeit not in line with the climate models of the time, aren't evidence of warming? I'm puzzled, how is a graph showing warming not evidence of warming?

ALL THE MODELS ARE WRONGTHAT MEANS THE THEORY IS WRONG

I have a model of the solar system, an orrery. It shows the relative position of the planets and moons as they or

"The average temperature in the United States has risen rapidly and drastically since 1980, and recent decades have been the warmest of the past 1,500 years"

Ok, and there were glaciers down to what like Ohio less than 10,000 years ago. Pretty sure humans had nothing to do with the warming of the last 9900 years, where is the evidence that we affected the last 100 years of warming?

It's in the report. And in many other reports. You're simply saying that because there's natural warming, there can't be man-made warming. Are you also saying that because there's natural fires, there can't be man-made fires?

You don't need to be on any side of the fence to understand that, of course, humans have an effect on so called "global warming". After all, we live in a very small sandbox. Nevertheless, the real hard problem to solve is exactly what effect we have and what is the importance of it compared to the completely hypothetical scenario where we wouldn't be present.

Of course, this is not a justification for not doing our best to reduce potentially unwanted impacts we have on our environment.

"The average temperature in the United States has risen rapidly and drastically since 1980, and recent decades have been the warmest of the past 1,500 years"

Ok, and there were glaciers down to what like Ohio less than 10,000 years ago. Pretty sure humans had nothing to do with the warming of the last 9900 years, where is the evidence that we affected the last 100 years of warming? (Hint: CO2 levels are flat if you don't cherry pick the historical data).

That, at least, is the story told by a new paper published in Nature on April 5 that reconstructs the end of the last ice age. Researchers examined sediment cores collected from deep beneath the sea and from lakes as well as the tiny bubbles of ancient air trapped inside ice cores taken from Antarctica, Greenland and elsewhere. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) The research suggests that—contrary to some prior findings—CO2 led the prior round of global warming rather than vice versa, just as it continues to do today thanks to rising emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases.

"We find that global temperature lags a bit behind the CO2 [levels]," explains paleoclimatologist Jeremy Shakun, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration fellow at Harvard and Columbia universities, who led the research charting ancient CO2 concentrations and global temperatures. "CO2 was the big driver of global warming at the end of the Ice Age."

IOW (non-anthropogenic) CO2 played a major role in the end of the last Ice Age, but in the 10,00 years before your cherry picked 10,000 years-ago starting date for that end.

"The average temperature in the United States has risen rapidly and drastically since 1980, and recent decades have been the warmest of the past 1,500 years"

Ok, and there were glaciers down to what like Ohio less than 10,000 years ago. Pretty sure humans had nothing to do with the warming of the last 9900 years, where is the evidence that we affected the last 100 years of warming? (Hint: CO2 levels are flat if you don't cherry pick the historical data). What would the temperature rise be without humanity? Unless you can show me the science that explains the non AGW of the last 10,000 years, you don't really have a case for AGW at all. The globe gets warmer and cooler and has since it formed, life goes on.

Downmodding or calling me names does not validate AGW, just an FYI to all my friends in the pro AGW side of the fence.

a) None of that means it's OK to dump billions of tonnes of CO2 into the air.b) CO2 levels are NOT flat - check your facts.c) Greenhouse gases aren't difficult to understand, it's basic science.d) WRT point c, human greenhouse gas production ties nicely with both the predicted and the observed sharp temperature rise in the last few decades.

My academic training was in computer science, and I work as a computer scientist. But these days I'm somewhat ashamed to publicly use the term "scientist", after how people calling themselves "climate scientists" have brought politics into science, thus ruining science's reputation.

I hate to break this to you, bro, but actual scientists are also a little bit ashamed when you call yourself a "scientist" with your associate's degree in CS from DeVry.

While scientists may not realize what's going on, or may not want to admit it, the reality is that average people do see and understand what has happened.

You could take everything "average people" know and understand about science and fit it in a Fox & Friends chyron. Don't believe me? When you're on the bus going to the call center tomorrow morning, ask them the difference between "average" and "mean" and see what the average answers are. If we're going to start using "average people's" knowing and understanding as any kind of metric in science, we might as well just give up as a species and elect a reality TV host as president.

If you have some special knowledge of climatology, then perhaps, just perhaps, you can pontificate, otherwise, you're just another fucking engineer (and a software engineer at that, so some might not even consider you an engineer in any meaningful sense) on a topic for which you have no fucking qualifications whatsoever. What you're trying to do is assert a fallacious appeal to authority, asserting because you had training in "computer science" that that makes you a scientist, and further that that allows you to lecture on the nature of a specific science.

I am quite certain global warming isn't occurring, and even if it were, humans couldn't make it occur.

And you're so sure about that, you needed to post anonymously to a website that allows you to use a psuedonym, because these ideas are so damaging to credibility that they are not worth associating with even a throwaway identity.

Anyway, people need to get a grip on this subject and meet in the middle...

Silly attempts to look "fair & balanced" on the climate is a big part of the problem--as soon as you start doing that, you've caved to the anti-science crowd who think that, if they tell themselves enough fairy tales, they'll become true.

Anyway, people need to get a grip on this subject and meet in the middle...

Silly attempts to look "fair & balanced" on the climate is a big part of the problem--as soon as you start doing that, you've caved to the anti-science crowd who think that, if they tell themselves enough fairy tales, they'll become true.

For a practical example, let's meet in the middle with the Flat Earth crowd, and agree that the Earth is a very oblate spheroid.

Exactly... step 1: get people to admit animals impact their environments. If you can't get that, then you've got a flat earther, so move on and skip the fringe.

The way I see, both sides have valid points: the earth is in a warming trend, and would be with or without us. But this warming trend is accelerated because of the impact of humankind - our emissions are acting as a catalyst. People like simple explanations.... why did some guy shoot up a daycare center? The answers are not simple, they are compl

But that's not what I'm talking about -I'm talking about that, even if you accept AGW, what do you do about it? If humans completely disappeared from the planet this very second, the temperature still rises (according to the article) 0.5c. They also say if we do nothing it rises 2.0c. So what do you do? They suggest future emissions are going to cause an additional 1.5c rise, so even if you cut our emissions in half, we still rise a total of 1.25c (maybe - I'm doing math using a direct correlation, but

Instead of inflicting trillions of dollars in economic damage making the world stop producing, stop progressing, putting millions, if not billions out of work, we should be focusing on dealing with it rather than stopping it,

You're using a straw man here. Most people aren't advocating anything like that.

If anything, combating climate change means more work (creating and building new technology), not less. And yes, that's worthwhile. One extra degree of warming (if we don't do anything vs. if we do try to stop climate change) may not sound so much, but it translates to a lot of sea level rise, putting hundreds of millions of people at risk. It means weather extremes get more extreme.

Stopping the increase in emissions has other advantages. Cleaner air means fewer people die. Reducing reliance on fossil fuels means less power to those who produce the fossil fuels.And we're going to have to transition to other fuels anyway as coal, gas and oil run out, so why not now?

meet in the middle

There is no middle. One one side you have science, on the other you have people denying the science while not backing up their assertions with facts.

I can't afford it, and I wouldn't recoup my investment because I certainly won't own the house long enough.

Why? Having just sold my house the solar panels paid for themselves in the added house value. Additionally while renting it out for a year I jacked up the rent by the average cost of electricity for people so even while not living there I was getting the rewards.

If you find it valuable, chances are other people will as well and pay accordingly.

we should be focusing on dealing with it rather than stopping it, because it's coming even if we cut emissions in half.

There is no "dealing with it". The chart goes all hockey stick for a reason. The last time CO2 levels were this high, we couldn't have lived here. The only way to deal with it is to stop the runaway condition before it goes that way again. It might even be possible, if we not only stopped CO2 release but also did everything humanly possible to fix CO2. And even then, thanks to the warming of the ocean, we're still going to have a lot to do. We'll still need to artificially institute some kind of global cool

No one's proposing we destroy millions of jobs. We're proposing we replace millions of jobs, say coal mining to lithium mining for batteries. Oil and gas production to solar panel/wind turbine production and installation. ICE vehicle manufacturing to EV manufacturing. And we still need a truckload of infrastructure improvements: decaying bridges, new power lines for the increase in renewable electricity demand due to EVs.

As for the question of "who pays for all of that?", the answer is the rich people and c

You provided absolutely zero arguments in your fisking of the ops post. Just attacks. I'm inclined to believe op is correct, and you feel threatened that maybe the "consensus" isn't really as stong as you first thought.

All real slashdot readers browse at -1 so as to avoid the political bullshit that has taken over the moderation system.

Hmm... I'd call myself a real Slashdot reader. Until recently I've always browsed exclusively at -1, and I often upmodded -1 posts even when I disagreed with them, because I felt that they contributed something to the discussion. But just within the last few days I stopped doing so, because now the overwhelming majority of -1 comments are racist, or sexist, or childish name calling, or Trump non-sequiturs, or other toxic crap that have made this place like a birdcage in which the newspaper never gets replaced. I totally get your desire to "avoid the political bullshit" - but for me, satisfying that desire currently requires that I don't browse at -1.

No. In the natural course of things, CO2 follows warming. Now, for the first time in the record, CO2 is leading temperature while temperature changes faster then ever recorded, AND in the opposite direction from the trend prior to the use of fossil fuels.. So this is literally unprecedented, Perhaps you should pay attention to the people who actually gather the data instead of the people who deliberately misstate it?

Pretty simple - there WASN'T a "pause" from 1998 to 2015. 1998 was well above the trend - an outlier, with both 1997 and 1999 significantly lower. 2015 was the first year that was higher than 1998, but the preceding and following years were not much lower - so the 3 year (or 5 year, or 10 year) average for the late 90s was significantly lower than the average for the last few years.

So at best you could say "There was a huge drop from 1998 to 1999, then steady warming, temperatures have been rising since 1999." Which sounds pretty odd, but is much more accurate than any so-called "pause".

If you are on this page, you probably understand something about signal processing and statistics -ask yourself why people have been saying there was a "pause" when the data - whether statistically analysed or just plain eyeballed - shows no such thing.

Ahh, so "cherry picking". What about the Medieval Warm Period? It was global, and it was warmer than today. What caused the warming from 1910 to 1940 (warming that is greater than 1980 to today)? What caused the global cooling from 1945 to 1975? Perhaps using 1980 to today is the cherry pick as well?

What about the Medieval Warm Period?Which of them? There where three.It was global, and it was warmer than today.How global they were is still depabet. None of them was warmer thn today. That is a/. myth.What caused the warming from 1910 to 1940 I'm mot aware about a particular warming, besides the warming caused by CO2 during that period. Compared to today it was actually relatively cold, at least in winters.What caused the global cooling from 1945 to 1975?The sulfur emmissions from coal power plants. Don't you learn anything in school at your place?

You're either a liar or an fucking moron . CO2's absorption properties and the consequences of increased CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have been known for over a century. And your "20 year claim" is nothing more than cherry picked nonsense that is, on the face of it false. So I'm leaning towards lying troll, but low IQ moron is also possible.

If we can use some gas to trap heat, can we use it to maintain extremely hot conditions? Sun-level temperatures? Not questioning the report here (not agreeing with it). But the way summary was posited is dumb. Neither CO2, nor methane trap heat. they slightly increase the drag on the outflow of the heat from the planet surface.

Yes you can actually, *if* you have enough of it and keep adding enough energy going fast enough to keep accumulating heat. Is it going to happen? No, not unless you're God playing minecraft. But yes, you're exactly right that we're talking about *slowing* heat escape, so are the authors. What's essentially happening on almost every planetary bodies in the solar system is balance of energy between multiple sources. While heat is escaping from the planet's core, which warms the surface a little as the b

No one is claiming that greenhouse gasses trap all the heat, only that they reduce the heat flow. The term "heat trap" is not intended to imply that all heat is trapped, it is neither insightful not useful to pretend to be confused on the subject.

Easy, he's just ignorant on the topic. He wasn't pretending to be confused, he was confused! Instead, attack his real mistakes which was not only his ignorance of the topic, followed up by arrogance to spontaneously know the topic better than the original authors (because of course he didn't know enough to know he didn't know). Classic Dunning Kruger stuff, which effects us all lol.

To date there is ZERO proof climate change is affected by humans. And yet the scientific community which keeps reminding us that "correlation does not imply causation" keep saying the "evidence" is overwhelming (again there is none). Is the climate rising? There is evidence to support that claim but it is hardly overwhelming and there is also research that seems to contradict (no I'm not talking about THAT "research") these findings. So without any factual research to tie humans to the research supporters o